Felix Salmon

Earlier today, a union organizer from Oakland named Max Bell Alper successfully (if briefly) trolled the internet with a stunt showing him shouting at a protestor. The protest was against Google’s buses: they use municipal infrastructure, but don’t giving anything back in return. Alper’s monologue, delivered in character as an obnoxious Google employee, went like this:

When I wrote my piece last week about art-market reporting, I didn’t name names, I was just trying to lay out some basic rules. And while I’m happy to engage in the occasional snarky tweet about some of the bad reporting out there, I generally won’t make an entire blog post out of such complaining. Because it’s boring, and also because it’s invidious to pick out just one bad article from hundreds or even thousands.

I’ve always felt that the Daily Show should do more financial stuff, and there’s no doubt that Wednesday’s piece on Blackstone was funny. But it was also extremely credulous about a single Bloomberg article from October.

It’s the season of good cheer, and the BLS is doing its bit to make econowonks happy in December. The last jobs report of 2013 is a great one; it now looks as though Fed chair Ben Bernanke is going to be able to go out on a high note, having brought the unemployment rate down to the key 7% level.

Earlier this week, Matt Yglesias wrote a post about what he calls “America’s Microbank Problem”: this country has far too many banks, he says, and they’re far too small. A rebuttal soon came from Rob Blackwell of American Banker, who called Yglesias “dead wrong”. This is an argument which clearly needs to be adjudicated! And in this case, I’m afraid, Blackwell wins.

Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the CEOs of America’s biggest banks today, telling them to reveal how much money they give to Washington think tanks — policymakers and the public, she says, should know when they’re being fed a corporate-lobbying line, and when they’re getting valuable information from a genuinely independent think tank.

Last month, I wrote about bond-market illiquidity — the problem that it’s incredibly difficult to buy and sell bonds in any kind of volume, especially if they’re not Treasuries. That’s a big issue — but it turns out there’s an even bigger issue hiding in the same vicinity.

I love the story of Jack MacDonald, which is only becoming public now, after his death. The short version: MacDonald inherited a substantial fortune from his parents, the proprietors of MacDonald Meat Co. in Seattle. But he made the classic promise to himself, that he wasn’t going to let the money change his life — and he kept it. He worked as a government lawyer for 30 years, he clipped coupons, he wore tatty sweaters, and even at the end of his life he was imploring his doctor to treat him only with generic drugs. He died a happy man, and bequeathed his fortune to three charities: the law school from which he graduated in 1940; Seattle Children’s, a pediatric research institute beloved of his mother; and the Salvation Army, in memory of his father.